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Abstract. Adding expressive body motions that synchronizes with gestures appropriately is a key element in creating a lively, intelligent virtual character. However, little is known about the relationship between body motions and gestures or how sensitive humans are to the errors generated by desynchronized gesture and body motion. In this paper, we investigated the motion splicing technique used for aligning body motion and studied people's sensitivity to desynchronized body motions through two experiments. The first experiment is designed to see whether audio will affect people's sensitivity to desynchronization errors and explore the role of Posture-Gesture Mergers in the transferability of body motion. A motion distance metric for measuring the distance between stylistically varied body motions is proposed and evaluated in a second experiment. The experiments revealed that audio does not affect the recognition rate, but the presence of posture gesture mergers in the source motion lowers output quality, and people's sensitivity to motion realism is related to an energy distance metric.

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Abstract. Do people prefer gestures that are similar to their own? There is evidence that in conversation, people will tend to adopt the postures, gestures and mannerisms of their interaction partners [1]. This mirroring, sometimes called the "chameleon effect", is associated with affiliation, rapport and liking. It may be that a useful way to build rapport in human-agent/robot interaction is to have the agent/robot perform gestures similar to the human. As a step towards that, this study explores if people prefer gestures similar to their own over gestures similar to those of other people. Participants were asked to evaluate a series of agent motions, some of which mimic their own gestures, and rate their preference. A second study first showed participants videos of their own gesturing to see if self-awareness would impact their preference. Different scenarios for soliciting gesture behavior were also explored. Evidence suggests people do have some preference for motions similar to their own, but self-awareness has no effect.

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